cymbalum mundi
by s2lou
Summary: And because the stage is a mirror if you just look at it the right way, this is what Aoko first sees of Kaito: a clear-headed boy with extinguishable smiles. KA, obviously. AU.


**Ohai thar. I'm back. Now to work. *cracks knuckles* I have no idea why this doesn't go in Gem's Entry, btw. It just didn't seem to fit, so separated oneshot it is.**

**Ficcie is dedicated to jun-bug, because I love her, to butterfly-chan, because I love her too, and she scared the shit out of me (again) (and now I'm the one scaring her out, apparently), and delyrical, because she totally inspired this with her awesomeness. (That, and I want fic. *prods*)**

**-**

**cymbalum mundi**

**-**

**going downwards.**

Here are to three things Kaito would gladly give up for the world: bedtimes, growing-up, and the slippery red wine-stuff the men drink as a post-representation celebratory.

Here are to three he wouldn't: the stage, watching his father play, and the summer evenings when he makes one of the three dark-hunched figures on the grey stone steps (one is blond and fair and always acts the aristocratic little lord-son) and the theatre's kitchen is all gold and sound and blue-swum windows.

The latest role they have given his father is that of an exemplary thief who coats himself in smoky roofs, although at first he is but an elongated shadow, thrown about by candlelight, on the walls of the chamber where his _papa_ rehearses his lines at night. There are twenty representations of this and Kaito watches all excitedly, containing laughter, and then—_and then there is a burst of light and a crash and a horrible cracking sound like a roll of thunder, and this is where, this is where they're wrong: an eight-years-old understands everything he sees._

The next day is a beautiful day and Kaito has learnt several things.

One is: out of the three he wished to keep by himself, soft and secretful and sweet like morning peals of bronze, one is gone. (Though it doesn't come out quite like that but more along the lines of _Your father died yesterday and he'll be buried tomorrow, he passed away smiling be brave boy he'll always be alive in you—)_

(Another is: there are tales of dead men walking.)

A hundred and four days and little by four hours afterward, they bring in a girl with short black hair, late and slow and huddling her in masculine, oversized, dry clothes. The matrons shoo Kaito away before long, even as they bustle about her with fireplaces and blankets and hot tea, and so what little he first sees of her are snapshots: the damp curve of her hair, thin-boned hands that a motherly grip closes around a bowl, ash-white skin.

(Her eyes are very much like marbles, blue and dull and slit in dilation, and it's only much, much later that he hears the story of how one of the troop's men dove in the river to rescue the child; they never _could_ find the man who threw her in.)

And because the stage is a mirror if you just look at it the right way, this is what Aoko first sees of Kaito: a clear-headed boy with extinguishable smiles.

Before long they sit on the working gallery above the stage, eating lollipops with the machinery man (whose eyes are slightly crosses from working both the ropes and the traps at the same time) and tossing pebbles at the blond, fair, aristocratic little lord-son (who is sure to complain about it after the show, but that's two hours—an eternity—away, so they don't really care, much), and so—

They are waiting.

However. When the show closes. "Come _on_, we'll miss the fall of the curtain," Kaito says, hands moving like little animals, and Aoko is smiling. She is treading a little hollow, a little sound, a little swift; a thin line of _little_s and _maybe_s but never _perhaps _(because perhaps has that breathy aspiration to it that may be little more than mere expectation, and may not.)

Kaito says, "I wish you could have seen my father play. He was the best comedian in the troop," and then, at the hundred-and-twenty-sixth representation, curiously, "What were _your _papa and mama like?"

"I don't remember," Aoko says.

… and of all things this is one perhaps a little untrue.

-

**going upwards.**

At age twenty-one, Kaito is given the same role they gave his father thirteen years ago. It does not sadden him as much as he expected, to realize that he does not quite remember the way his father played, during these precious few representations when he gazed down on the stage from the empty gallery. He does not act at all like him, either, and that is strangely, quietly fine.

(There are tales of dead men walking.

_They are falling, and then—)_

… the theatre is made out of the gold strias in marble and red-velvet and booming clapping in the furious evenings. It breathes in grey by day and blue by night and there it welcomes the people, the strange people, the curious people. It _exists_ in two tongues—one is for language,

_(—Tönend von Wollhaut und weichem Wahnsinn—)_

—one for music.

(_andante,_ they say, and it means—_walking pace_, and, _we are going.)_

The English, ah, the English and the French, they are a thick, lying undercurrent.

And so the theatre is this—a thousand beautiful songs in the waiting, striving for the small successes of anticipation; it is, as one would say in ringing Latin that recall the pale copper of music instruments, a mirror. It is a hole. It is a refuge for wounded animals.

—Aoko opens her eyes and sees the stage.

It is an empty thing, an unlit stage, all ropes and traps and devices shown, and all the décors gone. It is an empty thing, somewhat grey, and a little depressing. Here is the dry, mechanical regularity of a metronome, disjointed from music.

They are living the liars' lives. Their pretensions lie low and harmful (these are the pretensions of others' faces and others' voice, under a thousand and a hundred candles on a string.) They are living the liars' lives, and Aoko does not know if she can handle an empty stage better than a lit one.

_(They are falling, and then—_

They are rising._)_

"Aoko?" (Here are to three things Aoko wouldn't give up for the world: the stage, the blurred little pictures of her parents' stored away as memory, and the deprecating falter of Kaito's smile, as he stands at the far end of rows and rows of seats.) "We are going."

(_Andante.)_

But she follows down from the stage, in between the rows of seats, out onto the grey stone steps, and outside the sky—well, the sky is a beautiful thing, all pale, drenched blue and clouds that the declining sun beats to a tamer bronze.

This is a moment in time, a brief second, sober and high, that passes; but, when they come back to the stage, they fell they ought to transmit, via the silver-quick tips of their silver-touched fingers, a little something of the sky so clear and fine, when the sun lights up the clouds from behind.

-

**Um. Yeah. I have no bloody clue where that came from, except that it's all delyrical's fault. I mean it. Wholly and completely.**

**Next update is probably Gem's Entry, and then this 50-sentences I said I'd post, and **_**then**_** butterfly-chan's birthday present and **_**then… **_**well. Um. Nice to be back? :3**


End file.
